Scotland

It’s the end of an era. Ian Blackford has this week announced he will be standing down as an MP at the next election. Not quite making it to a decade in the Commons, the MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber released a 659-word article about his resignation that, er, didn’t quite manage to explain the reasons for his resignation. No matter. Mr S can list a number of reasons why Blackford might have been particularly keen to leave his role… The Patrick Grady fiasco Cast your mind back to last year when Blackford ordered his MPs to lend their support to a sex pest in their own party.

Kevin Pringle, Alex Salmond's old spin doctor, is back. Pringle was a key strategic adviser on the build up to the 2014 independence referendum and is ultimately one of the handful of people responsible for successfully – from a nationalist standpoint – moving Scottish politics off the left-right spectrum and onto one rooted in identity and sovereignty. His appointment as Humza Yousaf's 'official spokesperson and strategic political adviser', which brings Pringle back into the fold after a period away from politics, has been hailed as a smart move that could turn things around for the flailing new first minister. Will Pringle's strategic canniness halt the SNP's decline in the polls? I wouldn't bet on it.

Even with the force of the mighty SNP establishment behind him, Humza Yousaf’s premiership is still struggling. So when your own side fails you, who better to call in than your arch-nemesis’s second-in-command? Kevin Pringle, Alex Salmond’s one-time spin doctor, has today been conscripted to help keep Yousaf’s sinking ship afloat. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer… The man who helped Salmond’s SNP win a landslide victory in 2011 is to become Yousaf’s official spokesman: quite the choice for Nicola Sturgeon’s preferred successor. It’s perhaps rather fortunate for the First Minister that Pringle’s areas of expertise include ‘crisis comms’.

NHS Scotland has been hit with more bad news as new figures reveal that 18,390 patients died last year while stuck on NHS waiting lists. The numbers come just days after Public Health Scotland found that the equivalent of one in seven Scots are languishing on NHS wait lists. The latest stats show that Scotland’s health crisis is far from under control and present First Minister, and former health secretary, Humza Yousaf with a rather sizeable headache. Scotland’s central belt appears worst affected: Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s health board saw 3,276 patients on waiting lists die last year, while NHS Lothian (which includes Edinburgh) saw 5,995 and NHS Tayside (which includes Dundee) recorded 2,036 deaths.

Are Scotland and England drifting inexorably apart? To find out if that's true, at Our Scottish Future, we carried out extensive polling of people across Scotland, Wales and England, asking if they feel negatively or positively about our governing system. Did they feel invisible to people in Westminster? Two thirds of those polled in Scotland said yes. Polling in Wales, and both the north west and north east of England, has produced similar figures. We pressed Scots further: did they feel common bonds with people across the UK? When it came to Geordies, Liverpudlians and the Welsh, the answer was very frequently yes. It was only when it came to Londoners that this frayed – only 17 per cent of Scots say they feel common bonds with the capital.

Talk about going down to the wire. With today’s deadline fast approaching, the SNP Westminster group has made, at the eleventh hour, a significant announcement: they have finally submitted their audited accounts. Had the group been unable to do so, they would have missed out on £1.2 million of public funds, so-called ‘Short money’, making it a little more difficult for them to carry out parliamentary work. Now, at least one SNP crisis has been averted and the Westminster group’s treasurer, Peter Grant MP, couldn’t sound more relieved: I’m pleased to confirm that the annual return for the SNP Westminster Group’s ‘Short money’ for 2022/23 has received a clean audit certificate and has been submitted, on time, to the parliamentary authorities.

Scotland’s NHS has seen its waiting lists, once again, reach record levels. New figures from Public Health Scotland reveal that the equivalent of one in every seven Scots is on a waiting list. Care targets aren’t being met either, and the NHS is falling short on targets set for inpatient and day case waits.  A lot of the blame is being directed at Scotland’s new First Minister Humza Yousaf. From the time he took over as health secretary to the month he left the role, there was an increase of over 175,000 patients on NHS waiting lists, with 779,533 patients on lists at the end of March. Worse still, over 72,000 of the patients currently on waiting lists have been stuck on them for over a year.

By-election wins rarely presage great victories at a general election. If they did, the Liberal Democrats would enjoy perpetual government. But the fact they are not a forecast for national contests does not mean by-elections are always insignificant. In fact, they provide a good reflection of public mood at a given time and, particularly, sentiment towards the governing party. This has been true throughout recent history and remains true today – despite the excitement that will be generated by a Scottish Labour victory over the SNP at the coming by-election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West. The current MP, Margaret Ferrier, faces being removed by her constituents.

'Dear transphobes, we have a phobia of your behaviour...Yours, Scotland'. That was just one of Police Scotland's 'Letters from Scotland' campaign posters that started appearing across Scotland five years ago. Misogynists, racists and religious bigots were warned by the chief constable Sir Iain Livingstone, who fronted the campaign, that they'd be dealt with the full force of the law. So it is more than a little ironic that, according to Sir Iain himself, the haters have been hiding in plain sight in the ranks of his own force. 'Police Scotland is institutionally racist and discriminatory,' Sir Iain announced today to the Scottish Police Authority. It is also institutionally sexist and no doubt deeply transphobic, though he didn't actually name check transphobia this time.

Any uncertainty about the extent of the damage inflicted on the SNP by the criminal investigation into party finances can be safely disregarded. An extensive poll by YouGov suggests that those scenes of a police forensics tent outside Nicola  Sturgeon’s Glasgow home, and the arrest of her husband, the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell, have done lasting damage in the SNP heartland.  According to this survey of 3,500 Scots, conducted in April and May, the Nationalists stand to lose 21 of their 48 MPs in the next general election – including nearly all their Glasgow seats. Labour would return 24 seats across Scotland, up from only one. This could be enough to put Keir Starmer in No. 10 with a majority and pitch Humza Yousaf out of Bute House in a palace coup.

These days, it would be news if the Scottish nationalists were actually getting along. The latest row today is part of an unfolding scandal about former SNP North Lanarkshire Council leader, alleged ‘sex pest’ Jordan Linden, who quit his position in July after accusations emerged that he had groped and assaulted a teenager at a Dundee Pride afterparty. Eight former SNP councillors were disciplined by the SNP earlier this month for highlighting their concerns that accusations of Linden’s behaviour hadn’t been investigated properly. Two were expelled from the party, four were suspended, one received a written warning and another is still yet to receive a punishment after leaving the meeting early.

Junior doctors in Scotland have been offered a 6.5 per cent pay rise for this coming year after voting in favour of industrial action over a fortnight ago. Scotland’s health secretary Michael Matheson says he is ‘delighted’ to have reached an agreement with BMA Scotland, but doctors across the country are less enthusiastic.  In Scotland, 97 per cent of the junior doctors who voted in the BMA’s ballot did so in favour of strike action, with a high turnout of 71 per cent. They are looking for full pay restoration, which amounts to a 23.5 per cent pay increase above inflation, or an uplift of just under 35 per cent on current levels. Today’s offer falls some way short of that.